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SUBJECT AND MATERIAL
LET us suppose that you have found your style, that you have cleared the ground of common phrases, and that your work will now be distinct, well mannered, and your own. Remember that the common style makes a common story. By seeing to this first you have increased your possibility of originality. If at this point you find that you have got something that you are burning to write, I think you had better write it as well as you can. It may be. of no use in itself, but it will be good practice ; and if you feel very certain about it, it may be all right. If you are hesitating, you may possibly come across the advice that you should first of all try the short sketch or story. I do not endorse this advice. Some are miniaturists and some paint life-size. You will probably know best what kind you are likely to do best. But one or two warnings may be given. At this point in your career you should not attempt the novel with a purpose. It will lead you into bad and insincere art. You will be making your characters do things for the sake of the argument which they would not have done—things which have no natural ring about them—things which make your story seem made up and silly. Avoid also the historical novel. I confess that the historical novel, as a rule, reminds me of the definition of the ladycook, that is, a woman who has ceased to be a lady without beginning to be a cook. The historical novel has generally ceased to be history without beginning to be a novel. The danger for the beginner is quite obvious and simple : if he writes a historical novel, he is substituting indirect for direct observation. The historical novel must inevitably be to the writer rather an exercise of ingenuity than of imagination ; it is a mosaic from a design partly original and partly provided, and needs elaborate care rather than inspiration. At the beginning of your career you should cling to direct observation, to that which you have seen with your eyes and heard with your ears. If you deal with a time in which you have not lived and a country with which you are not acquainted, you are at the mercy of research, you are borrowing your eyes and ears. You are also running a great chance of falling into a convention ; the historical novel, as a rule, brings one to the conclusion that the people of the past all talked very much alike, and that one does not much like the way they talked. It is unnecessary to say that this kind of novel has been done well, and has even been done well by a beginner, but in most cases the beginner had better let it alone. Another pitfall for the beginner is the strong novel. It may be known by its title, which almost invariably includes either the name of the Deity or that of the less desirable part of the hereafter. The composition of such a novel at an early period is likely to lead the young writer into a mistaken idea of what strength really is. Mr. Thomas Hardy is not really at his strongest when he is writing about the underlinen of his heroines. Anybody can shock ; even dogs have done it, and this is a world in which it is impossible to be improper without impropriety. Nor is there any special strength, or even beauty, in ugliness. An ugliness inevitable to the story must not be shirked. A needless and intruded ugliness is a weakness ; it shows a want of judgment in the author. The clear, sure power and unwavering, right judgment are what give strength to writing ; and neither of these things is quite to be expected in a beginner. They may be there, of course, but I am not trying to teach genius. Begin then with some phase of life with which you are quite familiar. It is possible that this may seem to you too simple and uninteresting. If you think this, make the most important effort of imagination for a novelist—put yourself exactly in the position of your reader. He will not be familiar with that phase, he will not find it simple. If you can give the real effect of it by what you put down, he will find it more interesting than fantastic rubbish. William Hunt was right when he told his pupils that ' more imagination is required to express a human being than to express all the dragons. ' It is better, if possible, to take a phase of life which you have observed carefully some years before. That will have ripened in your mind. You will find it easier to avoid the bad mistake of reporting, and you will find it easier to attain the artistic quality of transmuting. These are hints and are not fixed rules. If, as I said before, you are burning to do a particular story, do it, even if it is a strong historical novel with a purpose. But remember the dangers. The collection of material does not necessarily follow the choice of subject. More often the two go on together. If one has the right habit of mind for an author, one is always collecting material, mostly unconsciously. Well, the child who is learning the piano does consciously something which, as an educated performer, she learns to do unconsciously. The small boy must learn the rules of French grammar consciously, but when he speaks French fluently and correctly he will no longer be conscious of the rules of grammar. When the young story-writer says that he is going out somewhere to look for copy, a phrase of which he is fond, he is not necessarily ridiculous. But if he is any good, there will soon come a time when he will know that the real kingdom' is within, and that all he sees and hears, all that he thinks and dreams, must of necessity be to him material. It is not the material that one needs to acquire so much as the right point of view. Anything is interesting if it is looked at from its right point of view. Matter is less than treatment. When the young writer really feels that matter is less than treatment, he is beginning to get on. Once he has realised this and put material into its proper place, he can go on collecting consciously as well as unconsciously. There is probably no knowledge of any kind for which a novelist cannot find a use. The real story-writer, for instance, will never be bored by men who talk their own shop ; on the contrary, he will encourage them to talk their own shop. A man is not really the less interesting because he knows thoroughly what he is talking about. It cannot, of course, be necessary to say that in the search for material the young writer will not use curious and eavesdropping methods. If he could do that, he would be entirely without the finer perceptions and feelings ; and these are far more essential to him in his work than any amount of alleged material. It is perhaps more necessary to remind him that all material must be digested. If we could make good stories by running about with a notebook and a knowledge . nd, we could all of us make good stories. Anyone can report, and few can transmute. I once knew of a writer of rather elegant prose whose domestic life, even in some of its more intimate incidents, could be easily followed in his stories published at that time. There is not much art in that ; there is not much of that right feeling on which the best and sanest art depends. You must, of course, be accurate about your facts. You must not, for instance, describe a dance given in the operating theatre of a hospital. It is a mere detail, perhaps, and the detail does not matter very much in itself. It matters because, to an appreciable extent, it destroys the conviction of the whole story. For some reason or other novelists seem doomed to disaster whenever they touch upon medicine or the medical profession. Doctors are still looking for that anaesthetic, so common in fiction, which produces instantaneous unconsciousness when a handkerchief, on which a few drops of it have been sprinkled, is waved over the face. Brain fever, ' as known to the novelists, is still quite unknown to the text-books. Here is an extraordinary scene from The Last Sentence by Maxwell Gray. A great specialist, on his way to attend a case, gets into conversation with a stranger in a railway-carriage :— `Well, yes ; I have been telegraphed for to a bad case. One has to go ; but from the symptoms I am fairly sure I shall be too late. ' Really? A medical man ?' My name is Sims—Parker Sims, ' with an air as if to say, The great Sir Parker Sims, the specialist of European renown, is not to be called into the country for nothing. ' How sad l' he commented listlessly. Particularly sad. A young creature with everything to make life happy. Fine, healthy young woman—I have met her in society—a very charming girl, an heiress, and not long married. Married to rather a clever fellow—quite a love-match, I am told—a rising barrister. There was a romantic story about her father, a Brande, of Swanboume. By the way, you may even know-poor young Mrs. Marlowe?' I am her husband. There was a long, , gloomy silence, broken only . . . Of course, no distinguished specialist ever jabbers about his patients to strangers, mentioning them by name ; if he were guilty of such abominable conduct he would not be allowed to remain in the medical profession. Ibsen, in Ghosts, says the doctor told Oswald Alving that he had `a kind of softening of the brain. ' As Max Nordau points out, Oswald's condition could not have been a softening but a hardening, sclerotic condition of the brain. But the blunders of authors are not confined to medical subjects. Lyndall says, in Olive Schreiner's Story of an African Farm : ' The bees are very attentive to the flowers till their honey is done, and then they fly over them. ' As a matter of fact, a bee will go into the same flower twenty times running, after taking the honey at the first visit. And it is easy enough to blunder, even when you know better, from sheer carelessness. Once, as a consequence of carelessly reversing my first way of putting a thing, I spoke in the course of a story of a reduction of three hundred per cent. in the price of the electric current—to the considerable and well-deserved joy of a critic in a financial paper. As I have said, such silly blunders destroy the conviction of the story, and no trouble is too great which helps one to avoid them. Consult specialists whenever your story makes it necessary — doctors, solicitors, engineers, shoeblacks, anybody who can tell you precisely what you must know. Wherever it is possible, substitute direct observation for hearsay. If, for example, you have to introduce a scene in an oasthouse, you may find something about it from an encyclopaedia, or hear a description from a friend who has been in one, but you had much better go down into Kent and get into one—see it and smell it. An exact note of the scent of a thing, by the way, adds greatly to the vividness ; for some reason or other the French storywriters use this little trick more than the English, and with far more skill. If so much trouble seems irksome to you, remember the definition of genius. Whether that definition be correct or not, it is at any rate certain that the amateur, as a rule, does not take nearly enough trouble. A beginner who had shown me some work asked me how it was she did not get on at all. I told her it was because she did not work hard enough. ' Work hard enough ?' she exclaimed. ' I do three thousand words every day of my life. ' I told her to spend the same amount of work on writing two or three thousand a week. Everybody except the genius must go slowly when he begins. When he has learned all the technique that can be taught, and knows it so thoroughly that he can safely relegate it to the unconscious part of his mind, then he may move as rapidly as he pleases. Do not collect unnecessary material. There is an art in omission. The rest, in music, is as important as the note. Many things will be understood to happen in the course of your novel which need not be described, and some which must not be described. A beginner once told me that he had to put a surgical operation into his novel, aQd confessed that he did not know much about it. He asked me how he should do it, and was much comforted when he was told that he should do it with a line of asterisks. The break at the end of a chapter is often useful in enabling you to leave out what you neither can nor need describe. category:Writing techniques